I made a little pact with myself that I wasn't going to write again until I had something nice to say. That's why it's been two weeks. Still, the new home page looks better, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, even now that I am back at the keyboard, the news ain't great.
I am sad to report that an old friend of mine passed away quite suddenly last week.
Even though I can't remember the last time I saw her, I still found myself floored by the news. I mean, it was out of nowhere. One day she was fine, and then BAM. She seemed a little out of breath the last time anyone saw her, but she certainly hadn't said anything recently about having any pain or not feeling well. Then again, she had never said much of anything. She was a dog, after all.
Sadie was a very special dog to me, which is a bit odd considering she wasn't mine. I don't think I could ever own a dog, primarily because there's something about owning a living thing for my own amusement that seems very utilitarian and just plain wrong to me. I mean, Sadie was dead like two days and there's already a new dog in her house, like she was a broken appliance, a toaster that popped up companionship and affection instead of warm bread. What does that say about humans? Whatever it says, I've decided, it doesn't say it about me.
Probably because of my uneasiness about pet philosophy, the fact that every time I see a cat with a collar in a box of litter I find myself thinking about Dred Scott, I've grown up with a kind of ambivalence towards people's pets. I would go over to somebody's house, and as the door opened some animal would jump on me and yell at me and scratch me and pick my pocket, and the living thing's owner would say something to the effect of, "She won't hurt you. (Scruffy! Get down!) She's a good little puppy; she just gets a little excited every three or four seconds. (Down! Scruffy! Get down!!) That's just her way of getting to know you; she scrapes the epidermis off of everyone's leg the first time. Or two. (Scruffy!!!)" And I would think, "'She won't hurt you'? Is that what passes for nice? No mauling? Lady, remind me never to turn my back on your kids." Then I'd look down at the animal with my fist clenched, and it wouldn't be saying "hi." It would be saying, "Ruff! You have to get me out of here! They drugged me, and when I woke up my scrotum were missing! They make me wear a bell! I sleep in a plywood house in the backyard! Contact Amnesty International!"
Sadie was completely different. When I first met her at my friend Ken's house back in high school, she just walked through the kitchen and sort of did a double-take when she noticed me.
"Hey. How's it going. Do you belong in here, or do I have to do the burglar-barky shtick?"
"Ken let me in. I'm Jim, a friend of his."
"How nice for you."
"You must be Sadie."
"Yeah, I must be. Have a nice night."
And she walked off. And that was it. No barking. No sniffing. She was the first member of her entire species in two decades who didn't pounce on and/or sexually assault me.
In fact, she seemed downright bored with me from the moment we met, and as with human females, there was something about that I found irresistible. As I hung out at Sadie's house more, I detected an attitude that I really admired in a pet, a demeanor that said, "Hey man, I'm in this for the ear-scratches and the warm bed. I get any crap outta any of you, and I'm outta here before you can say 'leash law'." I got the sense that she liked the people in her life well enough, and she put up with the rules for the sake of her cushy digs, but when you came right down to it, she was nobody's dog but her own. For that, she got more of my respect than some humans. Hell, a lot of humans I know aren't their own dogs.
Of course, like all friends, we had our share of fights. Most of them occurred when I was dogsitting during her family's vacations. In high school, there was nothing cooler to me than living on my own in a big house in University City for a week; it was a kind of Independence Lite with pay. All in all, a very sweet arrangement, unless you were Sadie. I had never been a parent, and her independence tended to clash with my terror at the thought that I might accidentally lose or kill her. I was supposed to let her out to use the bathroom in addition to the long walks we took, but I was afraid she'd run off so I watched her a little bit closer than she liked.
"What are you doing, man? I'm trying to go to the bathroom! Go away, you sicko! Geez!"
To retaliate, every time I didn't watch her she would of course run off, often for an hour at a time. And I would be standing there on the porch with bare feet, pajamas, and a flashlight, calling "Sadie! Sadie!" while she hid in the bushes across the street laughing at how stupid I was. I once waited so long to let her out that, once she was free, she stole a car and drove to Kirkwood. We didn't speak for days.
One afternoon, I was in the middle of making a sandwich on the counter when someone knocked on the door. "We're sprayin' the trees," said the bovine fellow outside. "You hafta move yer car." Before you could say, "spraying what exactly?", I was out moving my car across the street. The whole maneuver took maybe two minutes. I came back in to finish my sandwich.
I couldn't find my sandwich. I looked on the table. I looked on the counter. I looked in the hallway. As I went through every room of the house in search of a walking ham and cheese, I slowly started to realize that, not only couldn't I find my sandwich, I couldn't find any of the things I was using to make the sandwich. The cold cuts were missing. The bread was missing. I was doubting my sanity, seriously beginning to question whether or not I had actually been making a sandwich when I came into the dining room to see Sadie sitting under the cabinet a few feet away from a pile of empty plastic.
"You ate all of my groceries?! In a minute and half?!"
"Yeah, I know. 'Bad dog.' I'm under the cabinet. I'm in the Bad Dog Place. Whaddya want from me?"
"Well that is just great!!"
"Hey, while you're at Steak 'n' Shake, could you try and pick me up some of those cheese fries they have?"
I came back late that night, the whole incident forgotten. Having gotten used to the house, I didn't bother turning the lights on as I walked through the kitchen, which made it all the more surprising when I found myself with an empty cold cut wrapper on my foot. How odd, I thought, I remember picking this up and throwing it away. As I kicked it off of my shoe, I felt it rustle as it hit some other kind of bag on the floor. Turning on the lights, I saw why: the packaging Sadie had devoured earlier, as well as all the other garbage in the house, had been removed from the trash can and spread throughout the kitchen. In the middle of it all, beaming, was Sadie.
"Hey! You're home! What do you think?"
"What—what the hell is wrong with you?!?"
"Oh, tell me you don't like the trash now! After I worked all night to get it ready for you! I wanted it to be a nice surprise!… You're probably going to go around and pick it all up now, too, aren't you?! Well, that's great. That's gratitude for you." She walked off.
I cursed under my breath, got on the floor and began collecting the garbage into the trash can anew. A few minutes later, Sadie came back and sat next to me, searching my face with her eyes. I looked at her for a minute, wondering, "Is this her way of saying she's sorry? Maybe I have been a little hard on her." Just then, though, she gestured enough for me to realize what she was actually saying: "So, are you going to scratch my ears or aren't you? I have to get to bed!"
She was a worthy adversary.
She was the most pleasant company I ever had on a long walk, and she was one of the most dignified animals of any species I have ever had the pleasure to know. I will always appreciate the memories I have of her, but I still mourn the fact that she's just become one more person who won't be around anymore. I will miss her, even if she wasn't mine. I just hope God keeps an eye on His sandwiches.
|
As is probably apparent, I've been taking a little break from the computer lately. While some people have speculated that it's because I've been down lately, I wanted to do everything I could to dispel that little rumor as efficiently as I could.
Not the rumor about me being depressed. That one's true. Rarely in my life have I been so depressed. There are terminal cancer patients with divorce papers in one hand and eviction notices in the other that smile more often than I am lately. But I figure that's my own fault unless I do something about it, and shouting, "Hey everybody! Jim is sad! Make it better!" doesn't count as doing anything about it. (Primarily because my friends' idea of support is to pause longer than usual before saying, "So anyway…")
The rumor I want to dispel is that my bummin' is responsible for the dried up web page. On the contrary; being in a bad mood is the best reason I can think of to write. No, I have stayed offline for a very simple reason: I hate writing. Or rather, I hate my writing.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy sitting down to write. As the words come out of my fingers, and I look back at the paragraphs I've just written, I adore the entire process. Once the words have aged about, oh, a day or so, however, I read them and feel like…
have you ever had a spider or a roach or some big bug crawling around on your body? Maybe you spotted it on your clothes, or maybe you didn't notice it until you felt its small, bristly legs wriggling slowly across your bare flesh? You know the reaction you have when that happens? Well, that's what my insides feel like when I read myself. Occasionally, I have gone so far as to swat at my own eyes. Not so much with the boring old prose… but with the poetry? That's a different, eye-swattin' story.
Yes, I wrote poems.
I wouldn't even think about them normally, but I was recently horrified to learn that my high school has put our literary magazine online. A braver man in high school, I had been thrice published, once in the winter of '92 and twice in '93. Having long since forgotten the text, I went and checked out the page to see myself immortalized again.
Oh my God, it was bad. It was just… bad. Infinitely worse than I remembered. Bad. Bad.
I couldn't even tell you what they're about, because I am quite physically unable to make myself read more than three lines of any one of them. It wasn't so much a shudder as it was an unassisted spine removal. It was… they're just so… uhhuhuhhh. I can't stand them.
And I thought, "That's me there! When I try to Say Something, that is what I say!"
And so I didn't write for a while.
I probably still wouldn't have anything to say if it weren't for a friend of mine telling me that nobody likes me. In an e-mail, he'd implied that I couldn't criticize drinkers because I'd never been drinking. In pointing out the error of his logic, I apparently said something that threatened the hell out of him, because I thought we were just talking when he replied that my sharp tongue made me impossible to trust, and that was why everybody felt alienated from me.
After I recovered from the shock and finished calling all my friends in America to apologize for making them hate me (I found it reassuring that none of them knew what the hell I was talking about), I thought somewhat self-importantly, "You know, without even meaning to, the things we write can have a huge impact on people. Some throwaway sentence I dashed off last night made my friend so mad that the response was a personal attack, which in turn affected me so much I nearly went on a pledge drive this afternoon."
And I got to thinking about the poems. (I can't even write the word "poem" without my skin moonwalking. Uhhh, there it goes again!) Even though I always hated them, I was amazed in college by how they went on without me. They were like kids. They grew up and moved away and had adventures, especially "Symbiosis." I was told somebody was performing it at open mics down at Knox College. A guy I knew wrote a ten-page English paper on it in college, in which I was described as an "obscure Midwestern Beat poet" (needless to say, the fact that I do not have a copy of this paper is a source of great sadness in my life). The year I got it reprinted in the SLU lit mag, one of the editors told me it was being taught in a freshman English class, but I'm pretty sure that was apocrypha. Twice that year, people who were introduced to me recognized my name and complimented me on it. I've never been so uncomfortable. It's like seeing a photo of your genitalia printed on somebody's tee-shirt. I felt like they were looking into my cerebellum and seeing a light show. It was oogy.
The one incident that has stuck with me for my entire life, though, was the afternoon when I was sitting in the computer lab at school writing another bland e-mail to a friend of mine when a message arrived from a perfect stranger.
"Hi," it said. "I don't think you know me. I don't really know you either, when you get right down to it. I was a year behind you in high school, and we never really had any cause to know one another. Anyway, high school was pretty hard on me sometimes, and I just wanted to tell you that your poem 'Bitter Folly' kind of got me through a lot of it. Many were the days when I would be at the end of my rope and suddenly begin reciting, 'I really don't care for the classes I take/ or the people I know or the noise they make….' And I just wanted you to know, and to thank you."
And that was it.
I must have sat there for half an hour.
"I… I don't want that kind of responsibility!!!"
I never published again.
I haven't thought about any of that for five years. But it's this weekend's moral. You never know what kind of impact you'll have on people. That person you barely know, whose e-mail you never return, may have sheepishly had the biggest crush on you the world has ever known. Your web site may ruin the entire week of some Canadian you'll never even meet. You may make an offhand remark that makes someone cry themselves to sleep, or that poem you thought was total crap may keep someone from hanging himself. You never know, so be careful. More careful than I am, anyway.
Sorry. I meant,
Yes, I wrote "poems." When I worked the midnight to six shift at SLU's front desks, I used to write one a night. Many were about my relationship; some were about my fear of the Future; most were just what you'd expect from someone who was trying to write at four in the morning. I spent hours on them. I have a notebook full of them. The pages that I didn't burn will never see the light of day. The inside cover of the notebook is labeled, "If found, please return to dumpster IMMEDIATELY." It is all very, very bad.
|
Let me just say this right now: I deserve a freakin' award for sitting through this year's Oscar telecast. I mean, I love movies. All I do is go to the movies. A four-hour show about good movies should be the most pleasant experience I have all year. I should be a human showtune right now. But all I could hear all night were lines from 1991's Best Picture, Silence of the Lambs: "You don't know what pain is!"
Best theme for an awards ceremony:
Best invention:
Whoopi Goldberg theme we never get sick of:
Least likely movie of the year:
Best "romantic" excuse of the year:
Most baggage-laden moviegoer of the year:
Best new clause in my will:
If they commemorate me by goofily sticking their thumbs in the air, as if to say, "Way to go, ceiling!", just t.p. Whoopi Goldberg's house.
In fact, just t.p. Whoopi Goldberg's house anyway.
Most rambling and garbled English in an acceptance speech:
(prediction!) Best Picture next year, even if it turns out to be three hours of Tom Cruise combing his hair:
Weirdest way to screw up somebody's award:
Worst Oscar-related job:
Runner-up:
"Justice is Served" Moment of the week:
Insult to Injury of the week:
Weirdest reason to cite in hating a celebrity:
Weirdest reason to cite in hating a journal entry:
"How bored am I?" pastime of the week:
(Anyone who remembers that part, and can recite the line immediately after it, gets a gold star.)
Still, as I winced the night away, I began to ponder my own set of awards to pass the time between Whoopi telling bad jokes and Whoopi finally realizing no one was going to laugh. I kept a few of them handy in case I got around to journaling again, and since TV technically passes for my life these days:
Fever dream.
"I must have had some bad shellfish last night or something! I had this dream… we were at the Oscars, and Whoopi Goldberg was there, except she wasn't Whoopi Goldberg, she was Queen Elizabeth and she wasn't funny at all. And then an old man got an award for nothing, and no one applauded… and John Glenn was there for some reason… and Colin Powell was there for some reason… and then this horse came out, but then it left, and then Areosmith came out! And you were there, but you were naked!…"
the closed-captioning/mute button combo. Awful jokes go down a lot smoother when you read them. Plus, the awkward silence is constant, so you hardly notice it after a while.
Impeachment jokes!
Ha ha ha! Oh, mercy! Semen stained dress!
That would have been hilarious!
If it were January.
Of last year.
"Meanwhile in Stratford," the story of Shakespeare's wife struggling to raise his children alone while her husband screws a blonde twentysomething and fails to send alimony
"But… Shakespeare and Viola never loved their spouses anyway!"
me, apparently
(after watching the Academy's Gene Siskel and Roy Rogers "tributes")
If, after I die, some organization to which I belong commemorates my passing with an unshaven Val Kilmer leading a drunken, flatulent horse onstage while the entire auditorium stifles giggle fits, the executor of my estate is hereby ordered to spend the remainder of my estate on a truckload of bricks, which s/he will then throw through the windows of everyone in said organization.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut
Not clapping. "Yeah, Kazan, you snitch bastard! Twelve or thirteen of us are sitting politely! Take that!" I mean, if anything, clap your hands off. Hoot and applaud so loudly nobody can hear the speech. That's what they used to do in the Soviet Politburo. Would have added a nice symmetry to the whole thing, don'tcha think?
the guy who gets a list of everybody who died this year, who then has to go find 10 frames of film in which they all look earnest enough to be remembered by ("almost done!… now all I need is a heartwarming tearjerker starring… Mr. Roper from 'Three's Company'?! Aw crap!")
joke writer
When nobody would talk to Joan Rivers at E!'s pre-show. "Why isn't anyone coming over and letting me make fun of the dress they spent three months getting ready? Doesn't anyone want to be sniped at, humiliated and derided anymore? ABC must be hogging all the talent…."
I stayed up until midnight to learn that Oscar coverage would pre-empt Star Trek. (Now, Whoopi was good on Star Trek…!)
"Sandra Bullock is so stupid! Look at the way she throws! Stupid underhanded throw! Stupid Sandra Bullock! Feh!"
-my mother, watching the Rosie O'Donnell show
"That thing with the puppy dog? It was so… positive and sincere! Bleah!"
-a concerned reader
watching Wheel of Fortune on rewind. The puzzles just keep getting harder and harder!
|
Yesterday morning, my shower was stopped by a gnat.
I was getting ready to go out and tackle the day in my usual go-getter style when I pulled back the shower curtain to find this little gnat, happy as can be, stupidly sitting where giant killer peoplefeet go and whistling a happy tune. (It's odd, really. My mom keeps the most fanatically tidy household of anyone I've ever met, and I must have seen an insect a day when I lived at home. I've vacuumed my apartment maybe three times in the last year, and this gnat brought my to-date bug total up to a whopping four.) Anyway, I've developed a real aversion to killing (non-roach) living things in the last few years, and so I found myself unwilling to turn on the shower with him sitting there. If I turned the water on, he'd get drenched, his wings wouldn't work, and he'd drown and slurp down the drain. For whatever reason, I felt bad about that.
What's worse, I felt bad about feeling bad for this stupid little gnat. It's not like the gnat was contemplating literature on the tile or anything. I suppose it could have been an intellectual, but I doubt it. I mean, it was stupid enough to take a coffee break right where the peoplefeet go. Besides which, they don't really have the brains to write philosophy or ponder their place in the cosmos. Then again, neither do most of the people I know, and I don't go around killing them (all urges to the contrary aside). So, in my eccentric bachelor fashion, I just kinda sat there for a minute, waiting for the gnat to get bored and go fly somewhere else, possibly to a bookstore or art film. And I thought about what it says about someone when they find themselves relating to a gnat.
It soon left, and I turned on the water and got in, at which point it promptly flew back into the shower, drowned, and slurped down the drain. I decided that it must have been a suicidal gnat poet. I also decided that the movie Antz had probably made too deep an impact in my consciousness.
The reason I was getting ready to go out and tackle the day was that my ex-girlfriend was coming over to take me out to lunch for my birthday. That notion was kind of an emotional Old Country Buffet, with a steaming tray of just about every possible feeling being spooned onto my plate. I was glad to be seeing her after so many weeks; I was annoyed that it had been so many weeks in the first place; I was incredibly depressed that the only person in town who had seemed to give half a damn about me was a woman who used my heart to practice her needlepoint.
When she arrived, she brought with her my birthday gift. I can safely say that it was easily the most unexpected, out-of-the-blue, put-the-crackpipe-down birthday gift I have ever received, and that includes the Boba Fett coffee mug. Because, see, she knows me better than anybody in the world (what’s the saying? keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?), and she knows that I have very strong feelings about almost everything, and she knows what they are in just about every case. And so those of you who have pored through these volumes can imagine my surprise when she arrived at my door with a living, breathing, honest-to-Jesus fish swimming around in a Dixie cup.
I would have been less surprised if she’d brought me Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. I mean, a pet? …that’s a fish?? Why not pick me up a flask and some shot glasses while you’re at it?
"What do you think?" she asked. "The Hawaiian shirt I ordered hasn’t come yet."
"Guh buh?" I said. "Feng… schwe huh?"
"You hate it. You hate me?"
I looked at the black little blob waving its fins at me. The minute I realized it was mine, I was charmed by it in spite of myself. It seemed kind of like one of those oft-discussed "surprise" pregnancies. I never would have chosen to get a fish on my own, but I found myself immediately fond of the little guy.
"I… don’t dislike it," I said. "I don’t quite remember how to talk. Haven’t been a lot of people calling lately, you understand. Nice to see you, by the way. Wh… what made you think ‘fish,’ exactly? Where’s that coming from?"
She looked up at me in a way that screamed "concerned" and whispered "guilty."
"I just… I figured that, if you had something to look after and take care of… you would take care of yourself."
Oh good God.
She thinks I’m going to kill myself.
And she thinks she’s going to stop me.
With a fish.
Looking at the emotional buffet, surrounded by dishes of every kind, I opted for a big plate of "touched." Sure, the gift said, "I strongly suspect that you are crazy," but it also said, "I care enough about you to sell this fish into slavery in a Dixie cup." I choked up a bit.
(I guess it wasn’t exactly a Dixie cup. It was more like the plastic cups they used to give us along with our cans of Sprite at university receptions. And it had a lid.)
She showed me how to take care of the fish, for which she also brought a bowl, a fake plant, and some gravel that looked like Fruity Pebbles but tasted a lot, lot worse. She helped me chemically treat the bowl and the water. ("These betta fish are really hearty, so you shouldn’t be able to kill it. It’s a tough fish… wash your hands first!! Human skin oil makes them explode!!! And don’t breathe on the water!! Not too full; be sure to leave enough surface area on the water, or a living thing will suffocate in your kitchen and it will be all your fault!!") She helped me position the fake plant.
"I suppose you just need to name it now," she said finally.
"What does one name something without eyelids?" I wondered. "They’re not huge on personality."
"I usually name my fish after mythological figures."
Ah, epic scope for the thumb-sized swimmer with the ten-second attention span. Not as funny as just naming it after one of the dumber people I’ve known, but not as cruel either. I liked it. After an afternoon of toying around with myths and legends, I decided that the fish’s name would be Joy. Given the spirit in which the fish became mine, it seemed fitting. It was supposed to be what kept me alive, after all. I gave Joy a pinch of food and went about my day with a bigger smile.
Given a name like Joy, and given the spirit in which the fish became mine, and given the role the fish was supposed to play in my self-esteem, and given all the friggin’ buildup I have given to this fish, I don’t suppose I even need to say that I woke up this morning to find Joy the Hearty floating motionless on the surface of the bowl.
It didn’t quite register with me at first. When you get right down to it, fish look dead pretty much all the time. (I mean, you don’t have to tap dance to reassure me; all I ask for is a blink every once in a while.) I did a double take in the middle of buttering my toast when I realized that, in addition to Joy’s usual still deadness, there was no gill action. I’ve never had a fish, but I know there’s gill action. Then I looked down on Joy from the top of the bowl and realized it hadn’t eaten any of the food. It was just floating up there next to it. So I became a little alarmed.
"You’ve gotta be kidding me," I said to a bowl full of water. "Nonononono." Tap tap tap tap tap.
"Hey! Hey there, Mr. Awkward Suicide Prevention! Good morning!" Tap tap tap tap tap!
"Anybody in there? Anybody?… dammit. Damn! How can you be dead?! I haven’t even had a chance to f*** up yet!" Tap tap tap shake shake bang Bang BANG.
"Give me at least a weekend to kill you! DAMMIT!" BANG!
I sat there on the kitchen floor for a few minutes. I felt about as bad as I can remember feeling. In my mind, I began putting the world together one piece at a time.
So, there is a dead animal in my apartment. On my kitchen table, actually. And not one of those delicious, seasoned dead animals either. The carcass of a pet is sitting there, rotting and staring at me from a bowl. It comes into the house in a damn Dixie cup, two cubic inches of water and it couldn’t be happier, swimming around like it was trying to break out or give itself a head rush. Fourteen hours after coming into contact with me, and it doesn’t even want to breathe again. I can’t think of anything more succinct.
I wish it had had the decency to at least indicate how I had killed it. I mean, I don’t need a note or anything, but I fed it and treated the water and cared for it more than anyone has ever cared for an armless, furless, unbarking ornament of a living thing after knowing it for less than a day. Joy, you were defintely the rudest guest I have ever had.
I looked up and found myself very disgusted at the sight of Joy the Dead Fish. I tapped the glass again. It woggled in a way that made me ill. What does one do with a dead animal? I thought. I guess I’d better have a burial or something.
Why is it that every time I try to care for someone, one of us always ends up in the toilet?
I picked up the bowl and prepared to flush Joy down the drain and end our brief time together. But as I did, the thought of flushing and the mental image of the whole ceremony just seemed unbearable. "Nothing says ‘farewell’ to a living thing like Tidy Bowl!" I thought with a shudder.
What else could I do? Burial? Where, in the parking lot?
I could put it down the kitchen sink ew ew ew garbage disposal no no ew no.
I could put the bowl in front of my neighbor’s door, knock, and run.
That’s the way I'd want to be buried, after all.
No, I finally decided. It’s going to have to be the toilet.
I lifted the bowl and headed for the bathroom. I was so upset with myself for killing the little fish somehow… and then I suddenly stepped outside of myself and pictured the absurd image of me walking into my bathroom with a big bowl full of pastel gravel, and I had to cackle. "Give the gift of corpse disposal this holiday season!"
I decided it was going to have to be quick. Splash whoosh and down with the lid, all in one fell swoop. No time to see Joy cascade down into the toilet, no time to watch it go swirling into the infinite and/or the sewer.
God, this is pathetic. Let’s just get this over with and get back to hating myself.
I took a deep breath, tipped the bowl, SPLASH!, and quickly went for the handle.
"HEY!" said Joy. "What the holy hell are you doing?!?!"
"!!!!"
"What the hell kind of wake-up call is that? This is the worst place I’ve ever stayed!"
I spilled most of the rest of the bowl. "You have GOT to be F@^#ING KIDDING ME!!!!!"
Joy swam like a deranged Olympian around my toilet bowl. "You’re a psycho! I want to go back to Petsmart!"
I shouted at the ceiling. "AAAAAAAH!!! YOU HAVE TO BE F@^#ING KIDDING ME!!!!!"
I sat there on the bathroom floor for a few minutes. I felt about as stupid as I can ever remember feeling. In my mind, I began taking the world apart one piece at a time.
So, there is now a fish living in my toilet. Living a very active life, actually. Furthermore, I can move from my previous fear that I had killed the fish to the fear that, based on the evidence I have in front of me, the fish is attempting to fake its own death to get out of my apartment.
Look at him. Oh, he can swim now, can’t he?! Oh, he’s full of energy in the toilet! This is marvelous!
Well, this presents something of an ethical dilemma! I can either flush a living being down my toilet or keep a bowl of toilet water on my kitchen table. Or let the fish live in the toilet. I suspect that would be unpleasant for both of us. I’d better get the damn thing back in the damn bowl.
Of course, now that he saw what I was capable of, the fish was not about to get back in that Dixie cup. He swam like he was a fugitive. "Get away from me! You can’t care for anything! I want to live in the sewer!" zig zig zag zag.
Without even realizing it, I started to laugh in a way I haven’t in a long, long time. The whole thing… It was just so ridiculous. So idiotic.
And then I realized, like the character in a badly-written story I was, that Joy was not dead after all. I laughed even harder.
I must be the dumbest man that ever lived.
Needless to say, after the whole ordeal, I have a respirator and IV sitting in my kitchen (right next to the defibrillator). That fish doesn’t flushed again until a coroner has been involved.
At least now I have something to do. I must go check on him every few minutes. God help my first child.
|